Abstract

Densely populated urban environments provide unique nomadic movement patterns. People tend to move in groups across predefined paths, with low intra-group movement, giving rise to Nomadic Ad hoc Networks (NANETs). NANETs, which are a constrained subset of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) in terms of mobility, are sufficiently dynamic in nature to present significant challenges in the design of even the most common tasks such as packet routing or name resolution. An intriguing issue relates to the automatic configuration of IP addresses to constituent nodes that will allow data exchange. The underlying physical group structure can be utilised in the network layer as a basis for an address autoconfiguration mechanism, which would yield low and localised signalling traffic overhead coupled with a subnet optimisation. This paper discusses the AALM IPv6 address autoconfiguration mechanism, developed to provide the aforementioned characteristics.